Tempo Makes Your Calendar a Whole Lot Smarter

Your iPhone’s built-in calendar app does a decent job of culling appointments, meetings and plans from the calendars you’ve synced it with. But it’s not very smart about it. Tempo, an iOS app out of Siri’s birthplace of SRI, adds an element of artificial intelligence to your calendar, creating a one-stop shop for your day’s agenda.

Rather than just showing you the information you input into the calendar event from the get-go — the name of the event, where it’s located, maybe who it’s with or some details you added about the event — you can sync Tempo up with your e-mail and contacts so it can draw in more relevant information to the calendar event, and with a tap you can access applicable e-mails, send messages to involved parties, or dial into a conference call.

“When people think of a calendar, they think of scheduling. But that’s not the mobile first experience,” Tempo co-founder Raj Singh told Wired. “That’s on the desktop. On the phone, it’s look at the meeting and take action.

Here’s an example: You have an event “Meeting with Alex @ Coffee Shop.” The app has collected Alex’s contact information from your Contacts, and provides buttons that let you send them a message like “I’m running late” or shoot him an e-mail. It collects related e-mails and places them a tap away for reference. If there are attachments in the e-mails, the app provides quick access to them, too. And it pulls location information for the event. With a tap, you’ve got a map of where the coffee shop is, estimated drive time, buttons for finding parking in the area or getting further directions, and the option to check in on Yelp or Foursquare. Normally, to do all this you’d need to enter and exit multiple apps — the calendar, maps, e-mail. But with Tempo, it’s all accessible from one single place.

“The calendar is such a simple app and has not been disrupted. We thought it was a great place to bring in context and AI,” Singh said. “If you track click patterns on phones, people go in the calendar then go into one more app. We though, why not do it directly from the calendar itself, make it actionable?”

All this, and the app still manages to look clean and modern. You’ve got five different calendar views to choose from (like List, Day, or Week), laid out on a clean white background with grey and orange accents. You can quickly add or edit an event by tapping an icon in the upper right hand corner. On an event listing, it shows enough information to be useful at a glance, with more detailed information a maximum of two taps away.

Like any AI, you’ll get incorrect results at first. For example, a reminder for Tim Cook’s Goldman Sachs livestream pulled up contact information for a friend of mine named Tim. Not helpful. But the app learns what is most helpful and relevant to you based on where you tap. The system collects this information and learns from it so it gets smarter over time. After a day or two of use, it started much more correctly identifying the contacts, locations, and emails that were relevant to a specific event.

“We think the calendar is an excellent framework to surface a next generation assistant experience,” Tempo co-founder Raj Singh told Wired. “As you learn and use the app, we become more anticipatory and start predicting.” Unlike many other assistant-type apps, Tempo doesn’t run in the background the whole time, sapping your battery. It does however, like any good calendar app, deliver you push notification alerts you’ve scheduled for upcoming events — and just about anything else you’d expect a calendar to do.